Tony Blair on Why We Went to War posted by Richard Seymour

Something very interesting pops up on the Daily Moider . Here is the Prime Minister:

"I accept … that however abhorrent and foul the [Saddam] regime ... regime change alone could not be and was not our justification for war."

Well, that flushes David Aaronovitch, Christopher Hitchens, Johann Hari and other humanitarian interventionists down the pan with some rather unpleasant detritus.

But, the Moiderer has an interesting observation on the rest of the PM's speech:

"However, he claims to be formulating a new philosophy "in international relations from [the]traditional one that has held sway since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648; namely that a country's internal affairs are for it and you don't interfere unless it threatens you, or breaches a treaty, or triggers an obligation of alliance."

Blair suggests that this new philosophy should be a "doctrine of international community, where in certain clear circumstances, we do intervene, even though we are not directly threatened ... not just to correct injustice, but also because in an increasingly inter-dependent world, our self-interest was allied to the interests of others; and seldom did conflict in one region of the world not contaminate another."

It's not very certain how clear these circumstances really are, particularly when unreliable and politically partial intelligence is set as the basis for 'judgement' on whether a state's condition potentially threatens general globalised order.

One would prefer the elucidation of some ground-rules. For example, a democratic polity cannot be militarily attacked unless it directly threatens other states. In other words, the principles of Westphalia apply in these cases. In all other cases, it would be nice to see specific reference to Just War categories, though perhaps, given the Roman Catholic provenance of these rules, it's too hot a potato for Blair to handle."

I think Blair is barking up a dead tree here. He is unlikely to locate any rule-based system which would, say, legitemise a US-UK attack on Iraq, but not also allow a Nicaraguan attack on the Whitehouse. Rulers often have to drink of their own poison in this way. But, as I've banged on about time and time again, it is even impossible to construct the kind of system of unambiguous "ground rules" which I think the Moiderer is demanding. Why? Let me advance my reasoning again. Law is indeterminate - there is a multiplicity of interpretations of law available, and it is often a lawyer's job to locate the inconsistencies, loopholes etc in case histories to construct a reasonable way in which a particular law may be over-ridden by other concerns. So, for example, the Official Secrets Act can in one interpretation be outweighed by the claim of "necessity". The spurious determinacy given the law at the level of the nation-state (because the state has all the guns and can enforce any decisions reached) is entirely absent at the level of geopolitics. Law is a process, not a set of abstractions. For that reason, the process will work itself out in different ways depending on who has the greater power to determine the outcome.

Pashukanis , the Marxist theoretician of Law, insists that law is not merely an ideology (as some Marxists have had it), but a material force - it is the specific form of the way in which social relationships are regulated - moreoever, he says, it is a form specific to market societies:

"The exchange of commodities assumes an atomized economy. A connection is maintained between private and isolated economies from transaction to transaction. The legal relationship between subjects is only the other side of the relation between the products of labour which have become commodities. The legal relationship is the primary cell of the legal tissue through which law accomplishes its only real movement. In contrast, law as a totality of norms is no more than a lifeless abstraction."

The social regulation of feudal societies is different in this respect to capitalist societies - in feudal society, the law is what what the landlord tells you to do; in capitalist society, the law is how two individuals with nominal equality formally regulate their exchange on the market place. Thus, the serf might plough the land until his back is broken because the landlord tells him he must, but when he takes his produce to the nearest town to sell it, he is on abstractly equal relations with everyone else there.

In such circumstances, the specific interpretation of law that prevails will tend to be the one favoured by real social power. Economic power in the case of yer GATS and yer WTO. Military power in the case of yer UN. Blair's uneasy adumbrations will never confront such a manifest reality head-on. It is one of those things that just goes without saying - because we are virtuous, because we are just, because we are threatened by invisible enemies every day...